Franz Liszt – as a sound magician, he opens the gates to a transcendental world in which the soul can wander through landscapes. In Liszt's creations, the search for the absolute, a striving for divine harmony that exceeds human experience, becomes apparent. His music is a reflection of life itself, with all its ups and downs, its dreams and tragedies. Through the keyboard of his compositions, Liszt expresses the entire spectrum of human emotions: from ecstatic joy to dark melancholy. The fascination and mystery of Franz Liszt manifests itself in his compositional as well as personal extravagance and excess. The aesthetic romanticism and the expressive revolt of his piano and orchestral works are fed by his (life) experiences as a citizen of the world, fantasist and visionary. As a 13-year-old he impressed with the one-act opera "Don Sanche ou Le château d'amour", in which he took up the then popular fashion of French compositions by Meyerbeer or those of Italian ones by Rossini. As a piano virtuoso he broke the boundaries of pianistic conventions and set new standards, especially with his piano and orchestral transcriptions. These paraphrases take up a large space in Liszt's oeuvre, as he not only transcribes them one-to-one, but transforms them into romantic sound paintings. His favourite composers were Richard Wagner, Frédéric Chopin and Ludwig van Beethoven. In the festival play "The Ruins of Athens" op. 113, Beethoven celebrates the resurrection of Hellenistic culture in a Greece occupied by the Ottomans - Liszt used this to create a fantasy based on motifs from Beethoven's original for piano and orchestra. The year 1847 marked a decisive turning point in Franz Liszt's life. Up until then he had travelled to every musically important corner of Europe as a piano virtuoso, but now he began a second career as a composer and created a new musical genre with the "symphonic poem". His twelfth, "The Ideals" - based on a poem by Schiller - can be seen as a kind of meditation on the nature of art and the role of the artist in society. Liszt saw himself as a mediator between the earthly and the divine, between the visible and the invisible. May one feel the longing for the infinite in Liszt's tones and recognise the power in music that connects us all.  

Laetitia Hahn

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Jun 5, 2025

A9 Liszt, Chopin and Beethoven – Landscapes of the Soul · Thüringen Philharmonie Gotha-Eisenach

Jun 6, 2025

8.SiKo Liszt, Chopin and Beethoven – Landscapes of the Soul · Thüringen Philharmonie Gotha-Eisenach

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